Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Noam Chomsky, the American linguistics
expert and US foreign policy critic, was named the world's top public intellectual,
according to a new British magazine poll released.

Best known for his loud and consistent criticism of the Vietnam War and
US foreign policy over the last 40 years, Chomsky, 76, decisively beat
Italian novelist and academic Umberto
Eco and third-placed Oxford University professor Richard
Dawkins to top the poll.

Now an emeritus professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Chomsky first became known for his theory of grammar
developed at MIT in the 1950s, which held that the ability to form
structured language is innate in the human mind.

He later became known for his political
activism. He published his first collection of political writings
in 1969, and has penned over 40 books.

Of 20,000 voters in the Prospect/Foreign Policy poll published this
week in Prospect magazine, 4,800 voted for Chomsky to Eco's 2,500.

Vaclav Havel, the playwright and former Czech president who led
Czechoslovakia's 1989 "Velvet Revolution" that toppled communism, came
fourth.

Perhaps more surprising than Chomsky's victory was the dearth of young
and female names at the top of the list. Only two of the top 10,
pro-Iraq war British journalist Christopher Hitchens and British
novelist Salman Rushdie, were born after World War II, and the
highest-placed female intellectual was Canadian journalist and activist
Naomi Klein.

Voters mainly came from Britain and the United States.

Chomsky was unimpressed with the honour, telling The Guardian newspaper
that polls were something "I don't pay a lot of attention to," adding
that "it was probably padded by some friends of mine."

Monday, October 17, 2005

The Liberal Mind

CERTAINTY. It's no
wonder liberals hate Rush
Limbaugh so much. Today in the WSJ he
performed a feat his enemies on the left cannot seem to do: state the basic
principles and positions that unify his party in a few short
declarative sentences:

Unlike our liberal friends, who are
constantly looking for new words to conceal their true beliefs and are
in a perpetual state of reinvention, we conservatives are unapologetic
about our ideals. We are confident in our principles and energetic
about openly advancing them. We believe in individual liberty, limited
government, capitalism, the rule of law, faith, a color-blind society
and national security. We support school choice, enterprise zones, tax
cuts, welfare reform, faith-based initiatives, political speech,
homeowner rights and the war on terrorism.

What Limbaugh doesn't say is that liberals could articulate their own views
almost as clearly if they weren't so at odds with the pesky national
consensus that determines election outcomes. They could say: "We
believe in group entitlements, expanding government, government-managed
socialist economies, a judiciary empowered to act as an elitest
super-legislature, rigid public secularism, government redistribution
of assets, opportunities, and rights based on race and sex, and
subordination of the national interest to the rulings of international
bodies. We support government schooling under the absolute control of
teacher unions, urban-centric government make-work programs, tax
increases and increasing progressivity of tax rates, dynamic expansion
of welfare into the middle class (a la France and Germany), exclusion
of all religious institutions from public life, government controls on
political speech we dislike, subordination of property rights to
government-based social engineering initiatives, and a swift end to all
military and unilateral aspects of the war on terror."

But they will not say such things out loud because they know a slender
majority of Americans are too stupid
to understand the superior wisdom
of their ideology. Therefore, they are limited in their public
communications to only two forms of expression: 1) demonization of
Republicans generally and conservatives specifically; and 2)
misrepresentation, up to and including active sabotage, of the motives,
policies, actions, and outcomes of the Bush administration. The degree
of emotional fury and vitriol which underpins such communications is a
product of the fact that they must remain silent about their own real
objectives. This must be immensely frustrating, especially for people
who possess an almost fanatic conviction about their intellectual and
moral superiority over the rest of us. Small surprise that when
challenged, they cannot swallow the bile and obscenities that spring to
their otherwise sealed lips.

The enforced silence has had another highly destructive effect. Liberal
beliefs which cannot be debated aloud have become ossified on the
closet shelf where they are hidden. Because they have not been subject
to criticism and refinement through public discourse they are no longer
thought about even by the liberals who harbor them. It has been so long
since they owned the majority control they feel to be their birthright
that they have lost the ability to envision the real consequences of
the policies they still believe they believe in. Actual ideas have
slipped out of their grasp. What they are left with is an exponentially
increasing emotional investment in the simple fact of their opposition
to the party in power. The two forms of communication identified above
have, in fact, become the compleat substitute for thinking.

Limbaugh closes his piece with the following adroit
summary:

The American left is stuck
trying to repeat the history of its presumed glory years. They hope
people will see Iraq as Vietnam, the entirety of the Bush
administration as Watergate and Hurricane Katrina as the Great
Depression. Beyond looking to the past for their salvation, the problem
is that they continue to deceive even themselves. None of their
comparisons are true.

The key words here are "hope people will see." This is a
communications objective, more precisely a propaganda objective. It is
achieved not by thinking but by saying the same things again and again and
again, regardless of facts or matters of national interest. It depends
on, and therefore explains, the crucial role played by the legacy media
in transforming every story into a comic book fantasy of conservative
fecklessness, corruption, and failure. That's why conservatives find it
so easy to know in advance how the New York Times, the major television
networks, and the liberal pundits will respond to any event. The utter
dreariness and inevitability of their abusive pessimism is the ipso
facto proof that no thought is occurring. It just couldn't be that dull
if any creativity or intelligence were involved in the equation.

When I read Limbaugh's essay, I immediately flashed on a television
image from the weekend, a late Saturday afternoon
"fill-up-some-airtime" interview segment on Fox News. One of the
countless FNC anchorfoxes was lobbing softball questions at a pair of
female guests, one of whom was Eleanor Clift. When asked if the
increasingly likely Iraqi confirmation of the Constitution would be
received positively by the American people, Clift set her mouth in that
hard, extra-wide line which makes her look as if she laughed once years
ago, and just like the old old joke, the strain cracked her face in
two. As she droned out her dead predictable response -- "of course
not," or many words to that effect -- I couldn't take my eyes off that
mouth. It reminded me of -- what? Then it came to me.

On South Park, the heads of Canadians are always shown in two pieces.
When they talk, the upper half dances disconnectedly over the lower
half. Their heads have no insides, there is no content to their
utterances but high-speed jibber-jabber, and the black dots of their
eyes are continuous blanks. Clift may refer to current events and
topical names and places but the message is a monotonously continuous
mantra:
"Bush-sucks-Bush-sucks-Bush-sucks-Bush-sucks-Bush-sucks-Bush-sucks..."
This is the only idea that Democrats and their allies in the mass media
are capable of thinking, and it reduces all their responses to a
one-note unanimity that is far simpler than the genuine thinkers of the
right can usually comprehend. If your only tool is a hammer, every
problem looks like a nail. Wherever they look, Democrats see a Bush-headed nail begging for a blow from their hate hammer.
Wherever they look, conservatives see a bewildering profusion of
contradictory Democrat positions they must struggle mightily to decode.

There are several excellent examples in today's opinion pieces of
conservatives trying to apply reason to liberal positions and responses
that are, in fact, devoid of thought, so much so that the conservative
analysis is destined to seem wrong to the liberals involved because
their recent instincts don't rise to the level of analysis.

(H)ow long will the Western media get
the post-9/11 story wrong before they understand that they, the MSM,
are a major part of the problem?

For many months, the MSM and their assorted political allies have
indoctrinated the world in despicable lies:

That the Wahhabi terror in Iraq,
financed by and recruited among radical Saudis, was an "insurgency" or
"resistance" caused by the actions of President Bush.

That the Sunni Arabs in Iraq backed the alleged insurgency, were
uniformly opposed to the constitutional process, and would prevent its
completion.

That anti-Shia blandishments by Saudi and other Sunni rulers would seal
Sunni opposition to the new reality in Iraq.

In recent weeks heightened discussion
in Washington, and in centers of Islamic debate I visited, such as
Jakarta, focused on these claims. Muslims knew the Sunnis would prefer
to take advantage of their new right to vote, and would favor a
constitutional order in Iraq rather than continued violence. The
meddling of the Saudis was considered gross and embarrassing. Muslim
leaders I met were more interested in the future of the "Shia-con"
phenomenon, i.e. of Iraqi Shias aligned with the U.S.
neoconservatives....

(M)oderate Sunni Muslims who tried to tell Western media and government
the facts about the probable outcome in the Iraqi constitutional
election were ignored. Instead, numerous MSM reporters applied the
practice they have pursued since the Sandinista era in Nicaragua: they
found radicals and marginal, anonymous grumblers, and presented their
clichés as the voice of all Iraqi Sunnis.

Egregious, incorrigible examples of the Stalinist dialectic in the MSM
continue even after the Iraq vote. The London Guardian, on Sunday,
October 16, published a "news salad," tossed and retossed with vinegar
and oil: a sequence of paragraphs seeking to perpetuate the Sunni issue
as the sole topic of interest in Iraq. It tried to portray the Sunni
vote for the constitution as contributing to further violence in Iraq.
The argument, as convoluted as a tantric Yoga exercise, went like this:
Sunnis voted, but against the constitution (actually, only some of them
voted that way); although they voted in a process to accept the
constitution they will not accept it; supposedly, all Sunnis are
aggrieved about the share-out of petroleum revenues… blah, blah, blah

Mr. Schwartz is understandably baffled by the indefensible nature of such
reporting. He asks:

To put it more bluntly, how long will
the devotion to disinformation of the MSM continue? Will MSM
"journalists" ever be called to account for their consistent
misrepresentations?

The answer is, "No. They won't be called to account." No one of liberal
mind in the MSM is thinking about it at all. Mr. Schwartz's whole
analysis is wasted if it is aimed at liberals. Iraq is Vietnam. Now and
forever.

Mark
Tapscott at Townhall.com takes on the question of the MSM's Katrina
Reporting:

Remember all those politicians and
reporters warning folks to avoid at all costs the deadly mixture of
chemicals, gasoline, human and animal waste and decaying bodies
floating through New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina?

Guess what? Katrina left town Aug. 30, but it was not until Oct. 13
that The Washington Post got around to reporting that the “toxic soup”
never showed up...

Remember New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagins’ uncritically reported prediction
that 10,000 people were dead? Not even close. Remember the snipers
supposedly firing at rescue helicopters trying to save people from
rooftops and hospitals? Didn’t happen. Remember the little babies being
raped. No. The well-armed gangs pillaging block after block while
dueling with hopelessly out-gunned cops? More myth...

Here’s something else that’s frightening: In the first few weeks after
Katrina, we witnessed an orgy of self-congratulation among mainstream
media journalists who allegedly discovered in the storm’s aftermath a
new courage to challenge President Bush and the White House for being
so slow to respond to the desperate plight of the mostly Black, mostly
poor victims of New Orleans.

Where are the wise professors from the hallowed schools of journalism
at places like Columbia University and the University of Missouri
intoning about the decline of standards and honesty that allowed so
much rumor and outright falsehood to be reported as fact in the midst
of the greatest natural disaster in American history?...

No, I’m not holding my breath waiting for those things to happen
either....

Mr. Tapscott thinks the problem is a lack of intellectual diversity:

At Columbia, the ratio of registered
Democrats among the faculty to registered Republicans is 15-1. At
Southern Cal, the ratio is 13-1. At Berkeley, it’s 10-1.

Even in the conservative South at the University of North Carolina in
Chapel Hill the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 5-1...

What this imbalance means is aspiring journalists rarely hear a
vigorous presentation of well-thought-out conflicting perspectives in
the classroom or the campus newsroom. No wonder survey after survey has
found over-whelming majorities of journalists vote Democrat and support
liberal positions on major issues.

The only problem is that journalists would
get to hear opposing views if they cared at all about facts or truth.
It's not that their intellects are never challenged. It's that they're
just not working anymore.

Mark
Steyn thinks he detects a sort of conspiracy with regard to
reporting on the war on terror. He lists numerous examples of recent
attacks by Islamic terrorists that are attributed by press
organizations around the world to unnamed "insurgents," "militants,"
and "rebels." Then he starts analyzing the situation:

Islamic "militants" are the new
Voldemort, the enemy whose name it's best never to utter. In fairness
to the New York Times, they did use the I-word in paragraph seven. And
Agence France Presse got around to mentioning Islam in paragraph 22.
And NPR's "All Things Considered" had one of those bland interviews
between one of its unperturbable anchorettes and some Russian
geopolitical academic type in which they chitchatted through every
conceivable aspect of the situation and finally got around to kinda
sorta revealing the identity of the perpetrators in the very last word
of the geopolitical expert's very last sentence.

When the NPR report started, I was driving on the vast open plains of
I-91 in Vermont and reckoned, just to make things interesting, I'll add
another five miles to the speed for every minute that goes by without
mentioning Islam. But I couldn't get the needle to go above 130, and
the vibrations caused the passenger-side wing-mirror to drop off. And
then, right at the end, having conducted a perfect interview that
managed to go into great depth about everything except who these guys
were and what they were fighting over, the Russian academic dude had to
go and spoil it all by saying somethin' stupid like "republics which
are mostly . . . Muslim." He mumbled the last word, but nevertheless
the NPR gal leapt in to thank him and move smoothly on to some poll
showing that the Dems are going to sweep the 2006 midterms because Bush
has the worst numbers since numbers were invented.

Steyn is brilliant, of course. Too brilliant. He sees deeply into the
liberal mind:

I underestimated multiculturalism.
After 9/11, I assumed the internal contradictions of the rainbow
coalition would be made plain: that a cult of "tolerance" would in the
end founder against a demographic so cheerfully upfront in their
intolerance. Instead, Islamic "militants" have become the highest
repository of multicultural pieties. So you're nice about gays and
Native Americans? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but
tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure
to the multiculti- masochists. And so Islamists who murder non-Muslims
in pursuit of explicitly Islamic goals are airbrushed into vague,
generic "rebel forces." You can't tell the players without a scorecard,
and that's just the way the Western media intend to keep it. If you
wake up one morning and switch on the TV to see the Empire State
Building crumbling to dust, don't be surprised if the announcer goes,
"Insurging rebel militant forces today attacked key targets in New
York. In other news, the president's annual Ramadan banquet saw
celebrities dancing into the small hours to Mullah Omar And His
All-Girl Orchestra"...

I'm aware the very concept of "the enemy" is alien to the non-judgment
multicultural mind: There are no enemies, just friends whose grievances
we haven't yet accommodated. But the media's sensitivity police
apparently want this to be the first war we lose without even knowing
who it is we've lost to.

Sadly, he sees too deeply. It
isn't about multiculturalism, clever and funny as Steyn's formulation
is. It's about "Bush-sucks-Bush-sucks-Bush-sucks-Bush-sucks..." Emotionally the enlightened journalists of the world see themselves as insurgents, militants, and rebels in the great anti-Bush jihad, and it is therefore impossible for them NOT to feel some sympathy for their half-brothers in arms. In this instance, Islam is entirely beside the point. Too simple? Sorry, but no.

Think about the not thinking angle. It may help you in future
conversations with liberals even if you never read a word of Ann
Coulter's book. And it offers a solution to the one problem that
has baffled intelligent observers for years: If Bush is as much an
idiot as the libs say he is, then how come he keeps beating the pants
off them politically?

Because, as should be clear by now, they aren't thinking at all. That
makes them pretty easy to beat, even if you're the dumbass so many
Republicans have suddenly decided Bush is. Should that give the Miers
Marauders pause as well? Of course not. Not thinking is its own reward.
Ask Terence
and Philip.

posted at
4:29 pm
by
InstaPunk

Friday, October 14, 2005

Charles Krauthammer, who in addition to being a conservative coumnist
is a medical doctor, is fired
up this morning. It seems that the scientific community has managed
to resurrect the influenza virus that rampaged around the world in 1918:

This is big. Very big.

First, it is a scientific achievement of staggering proportions. The
Spanish flu has not been seen on this blue planet for 85 years. Its
re-creation is a story of enterprise, ingenuity, serendipity, hard work
and sheer brilliance. It involves finding deep in the bowels of a
military hospital in Washington a couple of tissue samples from the
lungs of soldiers who died in 1918... and the disinterment of an
Alaskan Eskimo who died of the flu and whose remains had been preserved
by the permafrost. Then, using slicing and dicing techniques only
Michael Crichton could imagine, they pulled off a microbiological
Jurassic Park: the first ever resurrection of an ancient pathogen.

And that's not all they've done. They've also published their findings
and are mailing samples to researchers who ask for them. Why would they
do such a thing?

There is a bird flu epidemic right now
in Asia that has infected 117 people and killed 60. It has already
developed a few of the genomic changes that permit transmission to
humans. Therefore, you want to put out the knowledge of the structure
of the 1918 flu, which made the full jump from birds to humans, so that
every researcher in the world can immediately start looking for ways to
anticipate, monitor, prevent and counteract similar changes in today's
bird flu.

We are essentially in a life-and-death race with the bird flu. Can we
figure out how to pre-empt it before it figures out how to evolve into
a transmittable form with 1918 lethality that will decimate humanity?
To run that race we need the genetic sequence universally known -- not
just to inform and guide but to galvanize new research.

The smarter kids in the class will already have detected that there's a
risk associated with this strategy:

(R)esurrection of the virus and
publication of its structure opens the gates of hell. Anybody, bad guys
included, can now create it. Biological knowledge is far easier to
acquire for Osama and friends than nuclear knowledge. And if you can't
make this stuff yourself, you can simply order up DNA sequences from
commercial laboratories around the world that will make it and ship it
to you on demand...

One batch of 1918 flu has the capacity for mass destruction that no
Bond villain could ever dream of. Why try to steal loose nukes in
Russia? A nuke can only destroy a city. The flu virus, properly
evolved, is potentially a destroyer of civilizations.

We might have just given it to our enemies.

Have a nice day.

Thank you, Dr. Krauthammer. It took some doing, but we did find an item
that might comfort the more enlightened members of our audience.

The Good News...

Nature is a balancing act. Every so often a new species is added to the
"endangered" list, as Charles Krauthammer appears to have done today.
But then, just when you thought everything was awful and hopeless, a
species comes off the
endangered list. Take a look at this:

During the last week of April, an
e-mail zinging through the bird-watcher community spilled the beans on
one of the biggest and best-kept secrets in ornithology. It proclaimed
that North America's famed ivory-billed woodpecker was not extinct
after all...

Cornell ornithologists and their collaborators...announced that the
journal Science had accepted their paper arguing that seven sightings
and a 4-second video—the result of some 7,000 hours of
observation—confirmed that at least one ivory-billed woodpecker
survives in the swamps of Arkansas. The ivory-billed has been on the
endangered species list since March 1967.

Is that cool or what?

The
ivory-billed woodpecker

Just kidding. Now we'll give the real (sort of) Good News. One warning,
though. It won't much seem like good news at first. It consists of more
information than most people probably know about the 1918 Influenza
epidemic.

A shift in perspective is required. Scientists -- i.e.,
doctors and CDC bureaucrats -- tend to toss the word epidemic around
whenever there's a disease that kills a significant number of people.
Perhaps they've changed the standard recently, but it used to be that
an epidemic existed only when a disease spread so rapidly that each
infected person caused at least one other person to be infected. AIDS
and SARS have been called epidemics, but they do not meet this
standard. Here's what a real epidemic looks
like, here's how it unfolds in time,
and here's a brutal description
of what the 1918 influenza did to the U.S. and the world:

In the two years that this scourge
ravaged the earth, a fifth of the world's population was infected. The
flu was most deadly for people ages 20 to 40. This pattern of morbidity
was unusual for influenza which is usually a killer of the elderly and
young children. It infected 28% of all Americans (Tice). An estimated
675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as
many as in the world war....

The effect of the influenza epidemic
was so severe that the average life span in the US was depressed by 10
years. The influenza virus had a profound virulence, with a mortality
rate at 2.5% compared to the previous influenza epidemics, which were
less than 0.1%. The death rate for 15 to 34-year-olds of influenza and
pneumonia were 20 times higher in 1918 than in previous years
(Taubenberger). People were struck with illness on the street and died
rapid deaths. One anectode shared of 1918 was of four women playing
bridge together late into the night. Overnight, three of the women died
from influenza (Hoagg). Others told stories of people on their way to
work suddenly developing the flu and dying within hours (Henig). One
physician writes that patients with seemingly ordinary influenza would
rapidly "develop the most viscous type of pneumonia that has ever been
seen" and later when cyanosis appeared in the patients, "it is simply a
struggle for air until they suffocate," (Grist, 1979). Another
physician recalls that the influenza patients "died struggling to clear
their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their
nose and mouth," (Starr, 1976). The physicians of the time were
helpless against this powerful agent of influenza. In 1918 children
would skip rope to the rhyme (Crawford):

I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.

The influenza pandemic circled the globe. Most of humanity felt the
effects of this strain of the influenza virus. It spread following the
path of its human carriers, along trade routes and shipping lines.
Outbreaks swept through North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Brazil and
the South Pacific. In India the mortality rate was extremely high at
around 50 deaths from influenza per 1,000 people.

It is in these grim statistics that we can glimpse the hint of a silver
lining inside Krauthammer's storm clouds. Though 675,000 Americans died
in the influenza epidemic, the worldwide toll was 25 million, with the
heaviest burden falling on underdeveloped nations like India, which
were even more powerless against the disease than the industrial
nations. If Islamofascists should decide to use influenza as a weapon,
they would have to face two realities. First, they could not hope to
confine the disease to whatever country in which it was initially
unleashed. The nature of the pathogen is that it spreads relentlessly
across borders, oceans, and populations, and much more quickly today
than a century ago.

Second, the impact of an epidemic like this would be far more
devastating to the impoverished regions in which most of the world's
muslims live. There would be far more victims in the U.S. than our
medical infrastructure could reach, but even so, our ability to fight
back with antibiotics and other treatments is much superior to what it
was in 1918. The same is not true of the muslim world; they could very
well lose the population advantage that constitutes the Islamofascists'
only edge in the insane jihad they are conducting. Even if they were
willing to slay two or three of their own for every one of the enemy
they killed, they would gain nothing from such a pitiless calculation.
They would forfeit any popular support or forebearance they presently
retain among mainstream muslims, and the only regimes that provide
cover and resources for their activities would be among the first
toppled as civil order crumbles into the desperate chaos of day-to-day
survival.

There is no winning strategy in the use of such a weapon. And, yes, the
Islamofascists ARE insane, but only up to a point. Note that the
terrorist leaders seem remarkably, consistently determined to stay
alive themselves, whatever sacrifices they extort from their gullible
subordinates. It doesn't take a genius to understand that loosing
influenza in Manhattan today might very well kill you in Afghanistan or
Tehran six weeks from now.

How's that for good news? It's the best we could do.

posted at
10:12 am
by
The Headhouse Gang

Honorary Punk Award

Bloggledygook

PUNK'D.
We don't give out this award
very often. It goes only to those who write pieces that need no
elaboration or injections of attitude to make their point. Bloggledydook
has done exactly that in disassembling Ted Rall as a thinker, a
satirist, and an internet force. Well done. We especially like the
logic of constructing the following verbiage as a means of attracting
Rall's attention to an opposing view:

Thursday, October 13, 2005

. Is anybody else tired of hearing about everything
the President has done wrong? We thought we'd go find a slice of life
that doesn't have anything to do with the stupidity of George
W. Bush.
After hours and hours on the internet, we finally found something.
Apparently, the President of the United States is not directly
responsible for the various pro's and con's of everyday life in Finland.
His name didn't turn up in any of the text on this page. Hooray. We
immediately assumed that Finland must be an absolute paradise, and we
whipped through this list of unique Finnish lifestyle items with
soaring hope. But then we ran into a few entries that gave us pause.

You
Know You Have Been In Finland Too Long, When...

6. Silence is fun.

The national characteristic of polite reserve, currently being
remodelled as people talk energetically into their Nokias and run up
huge phone bills on mobile internet or TV chat-channels. The old
stereotype of "talkative as a Finn" is becoming endangered as the
country grows increasingly urbanised and people have to communicate. On
a related note, Midsummer, a very liquid festival held at or around the
Summer Solstice, contains one element that proves Finns do have a
voice. As the evening wears on, robust and inebriated males of the
species engage in good-humoured shouting across lakes at one another,
thus: "Pekkaaaaaa, Pekkaaaa", "Arskaaaaa, Arskaaa". The conversation
does not usually get much further than bellowed first names, I'm
afraid. In such cases, a bit of silence would be fun.

13. Your notion of street life is
reduced to the few teenagers hanging out in front of the railway
station on Friday nights.

Again... it's not quite that bad...there are lots of teenagers.

21. You have undergone a
transformation:a. you accept mustamakkara (Black
blood sausage) as foodb. you accept alcohol as foodc. you accept.

The sausage in question is found mostly in Tampere. Fortunately, it
does not travel widely, as it has no known natural predators, and if it
got loose it could destroy the digestive system of the entire country.
As it remains in Tampere, nobody really cares.

22. You understand why the Finnish
language has no future tense.

No, I don't think I ever will understand that one... Finns are quite
future-oriented at two particular times of the year. On the day after
Midsummer (see above), they say "Well, it's all downhill from now on"
and prepare feverishly for winter, and similarly after December 21st
they perk up and start thinking about Midsummer - ignoring the fact
that they still have to get through January, February and March before
the place becomes inhabitable again...

26. You've come to expect Sunday
morning sidewalk vomit dodging.

The writer seems to have signally failed to grasp the cultural
importance of this northern variant of hopscotch or "not walking on the
lines", as made famous by A.A. Milne.

28. You enjoy salmiakki.

Salmiakki is - hmm, how can I break this to you gently? - salmiakki is
sal ammoniac, and according to Chambers Dictionary of Science and
Technology (a venerable edition from 1974), it is: "chloride of
ammonia, which crystallizes in the cubic system. It is found as a white
encrustation around volcanoes, as at Etna and Vesuvius. It is used in
chemical analysis, in medicine, in dry batteries, as a soldering flux,
and in textile printing". Salmiakki is also the name given to a salty
licorice candy containing this strange stuff, and is immensely popular
among Finns, particularly when they are not in the country and
therefore cannot get it. It even became a drinks fad almost as
threatening to the nation as absinthe was to France, when mixed with
vodka to make "salmiakkikossu". Along with hard rye crispbreads and
other delicacies, it is a staple of web-sites advertising Finnish goods
for the poor souls who are no longer resident here. I have also heard
that salmiakki is a by-product of one of the nastier bits of the pulp
and paper industry, but this myth, delightful though it may be, is
probably no worse than the thought that Finns of all ages are stuffing
themselves silly with something that might better be used in a dry cell
battery. You will never know until you have tried it.

29. You know that "Gents" is another
term for sidewalk.

The City of Helsinki is somewhat concerned about two aspects of urban
life at present, to wit the presence of "ladies of the night" in some
districts, and the weakness of the Finnish bladder. A few years ago the
old draconian rules about public alcohol consumption were relaxed, with
the result that major street festivals - May Eve and the Helsinki
Festival's "Night of the Arts" are two that come to mind - became very
liquid indeed, to the point of public urination in places where people
shouldn't. The city fathers have since then tried to curb both the
hookers and the piss-artists, and the government introduced nationwide
legislation on the subject of public drinking not so long ago. Even so,
if you plan to be in Helsinki on May Eve, pack rubber boots.

Somehow we don't feel quite as cheered up as we expected. We'll keep
looking. The Bush-less paradise has got to be out there somewhere.